Chapter 478 358: 10 Million Users, a Rival Appears! Goblin, Give Me Back My Grandpa

"♫ Merry Merry Christmas"

"♫ Lonely Lonely Christmas"

"♫ I want to send my blessings, but I don't know to whom. Our love is tied in a dead knot..."

The intermittent singing seeped silently through the crack in the window and into Chen Yansen's ears.

In the Chip Design Department, Mike Keller and Wu Shengyu were hunched over a laptop, their eyes glued to the screen as they methodically analyzed the Orange Z1's instruction encoding and pipeline efficiency.

"From an encoding efficiency standpoint, the Orange Z1 has lower access power consumption than the ARM Cortex-A9. Using extended instructions for privilege-level control also effectively reduces system call power consumption. Boss, did you write this?"

Mike mumbled to himself before finally looking up at Chen Yansen, his face a mask of shock.

He had no idea when Chen Yansen had started preparing this, but from his knowledge of ARM, the development cycle for any CPU architecture was never less than two years.

In other words, had Chen Yansen been working on developing a proprietary CPU architecture ever since Orange Technology was founded?

Mike found it hard to believe!

"How does it compare to the ARM Cortex-A15?" Chen Yansen didn't answer directly, asking a question of his own instead.

"Through out-of-order execution and multiple-issue techniques, the Orange Z1's execution efficiency is 40% higher than the ARM Cortex-A15. But to get a more comprehensive judgment of its superiority, we'd need to use simulation tools for performance modeling to obtain precise quantitative results."

Mike answered immediately.

"So, we're not buying the ARM instruction set patent license?" Wu Shengyu's mind was reeling.

The technical difficulty of the Orange Z1 was far greater than that of Huawei's Hisilicon K3V2 chip. The former was like constructing the main structure of a skyscraper on an empty mudflat, while the latter was like decorating and beautifying that structure.

There was simply no comparison!

"When you can get it for free, who would pay for it?" Chen Yansen found this amusing and patted Wu Shengyu on the shoulder, teasing him.

"Mike," Wu Shengyu called out.

"Okay, I get what you mean." Mike nodded and said to Chen Yansen, "Boss, give us a week—no! Five days. Wu Shengyu and I need to test the Orange Z1's architecture, cache design, and power efficiency ratio."

"I'll leave it to you, then. The Celestial Craft T100 will need to be adjusted accordingly," Chen Yansen said with a slight nod.

"If the Orange Z1 is superior to the ARM Cortex-A9, it's worth it even if we have to scrap everything and start over."

Wu Shengyu said with a determined gaze.

The depth of Orange Technology's technical foundation was more formidable than he had ever imagined.

After all, even companies like Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Apple had to spend huge sums of money to buy ARM's instruction set architecture license just to ensure the performance of their chip products.

But Chen Yansen had come out of nowhere, started from scratch, and launched Orange Technology's own CPU architecture standard. This was a move to take down ARM!

At this thought, Wu Shengyu's heart surged with excitement. He suddenly felt that perhaps his choice to return to the country had been the right one.

As for the ecosystem problem, it wasn't a major issue for Orange Technology, as it was fundamentally a terminal device manufacturer.

After Mike Keller and Wu Shengyu left, Chen Yansen called in Ding Houmeng from the Intellectual Property Department.

"This file contains the Orange Z1's CPU instruction set technology. It needs patent protection both domestically and overseas. I'll send you the specific layout strategy. The core patents include instruction encoding, branch prediction algorithms, register renaming mechanisms, and hardware-level encryption instructions."

"Also, don't neglect the peripheral patents for things like compiler optimization algorithms, instruction schedulers, and specialized instructions."

Chen Yansen got straight to the point.

"Understood, Boss." Ding Houmeng picked up the file from the desk and replied in a solemn tone.

As the director of the Intellectual Property Department for a smartphone company, he was, of course, well aware of the importance and difficulty of developing CPU instruction set technology.

Although his mind was filled with questions, he didn't voice any of them.

"By the way, I remember that innovative patents in integrated circuits can receive substantial R&D subsidies and tax benefits."

Chen Yansen said slowly.

"There are indeed relevant policies. I'll communicate with President Zhou first. Once it's all handled, I'll report back to you," Ding Houmeng responded.

"Alright, I understand," Chen Yansen said with a smile.

"Boss, I'll let you get back to work. I'll go take care of this now." Ding Houmeng stood up to leave.

After finishing the work at hand, Chen Yansen stretched, stood by the window with his teacup, and thought to himself, 'I finally completed the development process for the Orange Z1 before 2013.'

Getting revenge on ARM was no easy task. For over a month straight, his Spirit had been in a state of depletion.

Chen Yansen instantly made up his mind. He would not recklessly mess around again until his Spiritual Power was sufficient to sustain the long-term activation of his [Planck Clock] talent.

On December 25th, Christmas Day, the Orange Z1 was born.

For patent confidentiality reasons, not even many internal employees at Orange Technology knew about it. Only Mike Keller, Wu Shengyu, Ding Houmeng, and a few others knew the full details.

Generally speaking, there are three types of instruction set licensing models.

First, there is the architectural license, which allows clients to design their own processor cores based on the instruction set architecture. They can extend or modify the instruction set, but they must maintain compatibility.

The patent licenses that Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Apple purchase from ARM Company fall into this category. It offers the highest flexibility and comes with the highest price tag.

Depending on the client's scale, market positioning, and the license term, the one-time licensing fee can range from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of US Dollars.

For example, when Huawei purchased the ARMv9 architecture license, the fee was as high as one billion US Dollars because it was a perpetual license.

The second type is the core license, also known as an IP core license. This provides a ready-made CPU core that can be integrated with components like a GPU onto a single SoC chip, but the core design cannot be significantly modified.